NOTES TO XIII.—FIRST PART.
Few stories are more familiar and widely spread than that of the Lost Camel, which occurs in the opening of the romance. It was formerly, and perhaps is still, reproduced in English school reading-books. Voltaire, in chapter iii. of his “Zadig; ou, La Destinée” (the materials of which he is said to have derived from Geuelette’s “Soirées Bretonnes,”) has a version in which a lost palfrey and a she dog are described by the “sage” from the traces they had left on the path over which they passed. The great Arabian historian and traveller Mas’udi, in his “Meadows of Gold, and Mines of Gems,” written A.D. 943, gives the story of the Lost Camel, and from Mas’udi it was probably taken into the MS. text of the “Thousand and One Nights,“” procured in the East (Constantinople) by Wortley Montague, and now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.[1] In that MS. it forms an incident in the story of the Sultan of Yeman and his Three Sons: the princes, after their father’s death, quarrel over the succession to the throne, and at length agree to lay their respective claims before one of the tributary princes. On the road one of them remarks, “A camel has lately passed this way loaded with grain on one side, and with sweetmeats on on the other.” The second observes, “and the camel is blind of one eye.” The third adds, “and it has lost its tail.” The owner comes up, and on hearing their description of his beast, forces them to go before the king of the country, to whom they explain how they discovered the defects of the camel and its lading. In a Persian work, entitled “Nigaristan,” three brothers rightly conjecture in like manner that a camel
- ↑ It is not generally known that the “Birnam Wood” incident in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” occurs in the same Arabian historical work.
